A holiday note from NYT public editor Byron Calame, explaining why the Grey Lady is unloading gobs of serious journalism on your front page this time of year:

During just the first three days of this week, seven long stories from various series appeared on the front page of the paper, my assistant Joseph Plambeck has found. Readers who move along at 250 words a minute would need to spend an average of 20 minutes each morning just to get through the approximately 15,000 words from those articles in the past three days.

Why this deluge of fine journalism just when many readers are already busy with holiday activities? I’m fairly certain it’s because Dec. 31 is a deadline for the most significant journalism contests. Editors at The Times, like those at many other newspapers, probably are rushing out the final installments of important series so they can be included in the entry package in various contests.

And also, as any good publicist knows, it's always best to unload the most damming and important news at the precise moment nobody is going to give a crap.